Iokaste Enamored
by Sideris
Summary: She's watching always, Treasure. Come home.
1. Enamored

Iokaste Enamored

_Too many late nights._

Misato Katsuragi sits back, rubs stinging eyes clear and sights the clock hanging on the far wall. Quarter after nine.

The desk is littered with the usual suspects: steadily multiplying beer cans; ballpoint pen in dire need of refill; sheaves of paper, official NERV letterhead, flabby with monthly reports; the snake-necked desk lamp looks on in typical bored fascination. Misplaced order invades the overturned trashcan that is her room. She can practically hear her Dad's chiding, those old eyes always judging.

'_You know, Mi-Mi...'_

_Not right now, dad._

She leans back, pops her spine. The sound startles father out of the room and back into his dark corners. Still she can feel his eyes on her and the disappointment therein, ineffable and immense as it had been in life. She misses it in a perverse way. There is time later, though, for harsh self-recrimination.

All is dim. The blinds backlit by the streetlights, tinted yellow and slatted like a furnace door, and outside lies heavy fog, a billowing aftermath of three days rain. She loves nights like this; they draw her in to something so completely _other._ When the lights reveals misting rain, when the streets marble with pools of light countering the sharp punchhole darkness, she feels an odd nostalgia, a strange peace. Like something out of a Watanabe piece.

These are nights she wants to be out in anonymous crowds, not plying the unwholesome side of her job. Misato Katsuragi, embittered child welfare officer, at your service.

_Dad always wanted grandchildren..._

The words scrawled there on paper commanded attention, to be read and remembered with the urgency sensitive information always required. The notes, the case files, her small stack of personal journals with spirals of words crammed in the margins; the manila folder sent along with Ryouji from Germany detailing Asuka's full psychological profile. Thick as a phonebook. The weight of it shocks her always.

Pages flow like water. So many months of observation and for what? To stroke her own private conceits at being observant, it seems. The wild thought comes to mind as always: take these reports, show the kids, see what may come. Hey, guys, look at your lives under clinical lenses! How does that make you feel? I can add that in too! No? That's okay. Transparency has no place in NERV on any level, the saying goes. Endless examples lay before Misato here in tight script. The cramped top line in her report on the Second Children's third page is but one:

—_**knee-jerk aggressive/defensive in regard aforementioned lower Synch scores. In line with recorded responses as before. Combative behavior more than norm toward Third Children. Suggest fewer actual Synch tests and more****kinesthetic batteries in Prototype Bodies along with indoctrination, tactics, any**—_

Typical recommendations which will certainly be summarily ignored. The budget has no concerns for their mental health beyond 'can they still pilot'? No compunction, no concern. If it got worse, Ritsuko would lift an eyebrow in concern, maybe.

Asuka's reports are single note drums; unchanging and drifting more and more into the background as meaningless noise. The girl needs something beyond NERV in her life. Anything but the ourobouros of Synch and Competition which always found fertile ground to grow within her narrowed mind. Misato understands the determination there; it came before everything else. She lives as a strange mirrored simulacrum at times, and knows what the costs of putting nothing but The Job before everything else.

There is seemingly _nothing_ else to Asuka. Redaction in her service jacket told as much. Not much on her parents besides names and the echoes therein. Mothers and fathers hold too much sway over NERV personnel, she thinks. More's the pity. Her fingers sweep at the page as if to brush the ink away.

Reclining, Misato stares at neutral space between her and the wall, blind to the world before a prickling thought lit through her limbs. They must be on the Commander's desk by Monday. The duplicates need to be in front of the Ritsuko and Section Two by Tuesday.

She picks up Shinji's manifest and peruses the first few lines again and again, warding off sleep best she could, and glared darkly. Another drink would stave hunger off. Fire to ward off the wolf. A growl of a decidedly human sort rattled inside her, she hadn't eaten since the early afternoon.

"Later," she says, deciding. Retrieving the Second's report, she set to it with a will she rarely felt these days. Minutes of careful thought, a scribbled pair of sentences, then postulation, then suggestion. Even a bit of theory as she drew out an old, sticky-note-forested copy of Myers' _Psychology_. It is ludicrous. It is necessary.

Another hour gone.

Later, she rests cramping hands, watches shadow-ladders from the blinds play on her stomach, along the heavy metal of her cross.

Sleep, that cunning thing, sneaks up and will not banish itself from her heavy eyelids, from the now ocean-swimming aspect of her vision. A gradual whisper of rain picks her up, wards off sleep, and she peeks through blinds expecting the runny sheets warping the world's image without. Nothing. Confusion knit tight knots of her eyebrows. Misted and foggy, to be sure, but no rain to account for the sound.

Then comes needling understanding. The shower is running _yet again_. The dull rain-spatter droned through the apartment, easily battering through the flimsy wood of the bedroom door. There is no accounting for it. A thought crosses her mind and she looks back at the books and paperwork nesting on her desk, see now: Irritation.

A list sprawled itself before her mind's eye: Asuka is gallivanting in nameless malls or alleyway arcades in Gotenba with Freckles. Pen-Pen was nursing a beer, pouting in his fridge all because Misato wouldn't drink with him (she'd make it up later). That leaves the usual suspect of past weeks. Her eyes flicked to the Third Child 's report as she glides back to the detritus of work. Peels back the covers.

The first line stitches itself across every vague worry her mind can conjure like flashbulb shadows.

_**Third Children exhibits strange OCD-like habits in past three weeks. **_

Unbidden images swarm up, at first unremarkable — grave-quiet Shinji listening to his SDAT on the couch and wending away lonely hours. Not quite the norm. _Normally_, he closed up on himself like a clenched fist, became the hedgehog and raced to the solitude of his eight by eight glass box down the hall.

A thought, a page turns. The center of page six,

**_Far more withdrawn, yet_ _visible and out in the open instead of voluntary seclusion. _**

The increasing avoidance of closed spaces. Claustrophobia isn't part of Shinji's psychological makeup. Ritsuko even broached a simple answer: Post-Traumatic Stress. Elegant, distressingly obvious with a ring of truth. But it still doesn't hold water. She didn't want it to. Frankly, it disturbs Misato more than she'll ever dare admit.

How quiet he can be, wooden and totally absorbed into himself, spiraling the same few tracks of music hour after hour. The same tinkling little notes secreting from earbuds, trying to whisper to the world before fading out. The same tracks day in, day out. Never once has he changed out the tapes. And what lies in it? That little thing. What does he like? That bothered her, still bothers her; who didn't know what sort of music their kid listened to?

Even Asuka gave up the ghost. Nothing cops. And a cold, darkling chill runs down her spine.

_He's not my boy. None of this matters to him._

The shower, though, mattered. The exigency of NERV life didn't seem to matter anymore. Only being _clean_ did. The ritual especially.

At _first_, he'd walk out of the shower, tugging at his clothing, sniffing it, skin pink as pork, alive and itching from furious scrubbing.

At _first,_ it invoked laughter, a new pastime for teasing, a little pick-me-up. _"Our preening Shinji, trying to smell sweet for his ladies." _She said that three weeks ago after a second shower in as many hours. He'd wave it off, laugh, and dive back into his headphones. Nice seeing you, I'll send a letter. The usual.

"_It's fine, Misato. Really! Just...I dunno. I smell like...blood." _And that was fine, she knows how rank the stuff is when it dries. But then his habits curdled, soured to something unwholesome. Little things at first. Furtive sniffs at his arms in the car, a look of weary confusion overtaking his walk from the shower to his room as if he'd awoken walking. Lacking recognition of his sense of place. Harmless things, she told herself.

Before the sleep deprivation began.

Before waking one night to find he sleepwalked to the balcony, staring out at nothing.

Before he took to avoiding his room wholesale, going in only for clothes or his bookbag and only when necessary with the door jammed wide open.

Before Depth Test No. 25 when said deprivation relaxed him into deep sleep and his teeth bit open the inside of his cheek during sudden nightmares of drowning.

Before he tried to exfoliate his flesh daily, turning himself into a raw, walking sore.

Before these harmless things became _pathological_.

"Shinji!" she cries."I'd like to take a shower with hot water for once! Come on, we've not even had dinner yet!"

Like God's Own Voice, the valves shut off. Damp silence. Suddenly, a tinkling of a metal latch. The sound of the shoji opening. The half heard sound of steam hisses in the cooler air. The clap of the hamper shutting. Normal things. _Harmless_ things.

"Thank you," she says, stares at the sliver of blackness beyond her cracked door. Soft padding footsteps down the hall. A sigh. Another. She pictures his back, sharp and thin as ever. Shoulder blades clap under lobster-red flesh. The tension in his neck. Streamers of red scratch marks twining on his arms. The hairs of his legs looking like a Brillo-pad for all the scrubbing.

She checks the desk calendar and notes the date one week hence:

**17 June**

**APPT: DR. SATO FOR SHINJI, 8:45 A.M.**

Ritsuko had recommended it though she wouldn't personally step in. "_It's not my place_," she had said. "_I'm not a psychologist_."

But she has plenty of friends who are at NERV Central Health. All of it made Misato feel in some odd way like she let Shinji down. All of it. This is beyond her kenning. Grasps her stomach and feebly rubs at the cold pit growing there. She watches the tremor start up in her right hand. With a clinical eye, she watches it veritably leap to her left and catch hold. The thumbs pop oddly.

_You're panicking, Misato. Breathe. _

She did. Deep, lake-breeze breaths.

_The lake. _She wonders at the filmy yellow shadows of rain slapping against her windows and remembers the lake from days long gone by. The yearly trip to Inaba resting on the banks of the Samegawa River. She remembers the picnics under black and white oaks. The red rubber mat they sat on; obento resplendent and steaming due to her mother's picky nature; preternatural calm of the lake settling over them; the cormorants swooping low and soundless over the waters. How everything would come crashing down because a snide comment from her father crumpled her mother's face like a silken rag.

Pointless thoughts for pointless things._ Harmless _things.

The soft thump of Shinji's door shutting kills shakes.

* * *

The metal latch slides home with a click.

Shinji feels as if he's parading around in an ill-fitted soggy mansuit. Skin pruned and humming raw. The reason being, he'll later admit to Misato, he sat in the shower for fifteen straight minutes scrubbing his skin with a washcloth; it had come away spotted with little red flowers. The skin rubbed shiny purple and cracked in some spots, beading with blood like a treetrunk scraped of bark.

He still feels and smells disgusting. It won't go away.

The room is womb-dark. Lit only by a shaft of soft yellow light from the window, dancing with particles of dust. Illuminating the banality of panicked evacuation. Drawers ajar, evacuated of clothing. Freshly washed clothes left orphaned in the wicker basket by the door. All of it as he remembers, though, barren of personality. And yet there's no emotion. Normally the thought privately devastates him. Now nothing.

Breath stinging cold when he breathes deeply. The remnants of bronchitis.

_I'm still sick._

Nasty red welts blossom all up and down his forearms. The towel slackens around the bowl of his hips. See the fleshy suit draped on a coat rack of lean meat and bone.

Shinji doesn't know why he's here standing just inside the doorway. His face slack with anxiety. _Everything_ reeks of moldering blood. He can hardly breathe for the odd running hitch in his throat, vomit waiting in the shadows of any deep breath. All day and night he feels nauseous as if a finger gently runs up and down his trachea.

Days spent in a haze most disorienting. He wakes from stretches of fitful sleep confused and exhausted. Wakes to the room spinning. Wakes after sleepwalking. Wakes and reels to not trip over his feet and spill the floor with bile. Wakes to whispers half-dreamt.

However, the room is the same. Crumpled flowers of paper overflowing the wastebasket. Fat stacks of handouts and chaff from school he'd barely touched. No time for study. No time for the beating his thoughts into rote recollections. This _room_. It breathes with him, falls apart with him. Music. Music will fix all of this.

He stands still as trees.

"I don't want to be in here," he says, lifting his eyes to the ceiling and trying to shut out the world. He can't panic. Not again. Dancing shadows in the corners of the room go ignored. He moves finally, sits dripping on the corner of the futon. Towel sops wet and slackens down mid-thigh and the air cools him to the point of shivering. Wraps him in sheets of gooseflesh. He likes it, feels the sheets soak him in, smells the water cooling on his skin.

"Yeah." he says, jumping at the sound. So exquisitely cavernous in the still air. The alien reflex starts in his left hand again, clenching and releasing over and over and over. Jackhammering tendons stutter beneath the skin like the muscles of a nervous thoroughbred. It's concrete now, factual in movement. His hand lays across his knee, fish-white and pruned. His fingers bloom like flower petals every few heartbeats

He feels distant from his own mind. His own motor impulses. Out of reach. Nothing moves those fingers but the boy himself. And Shinji watches, awed by the simplicity of it. Is he doing this? Or is it some stranger's hand? This iss the way all things start. Impulse from the self guided by no power other than the switchbox up top and relaying with electric blood, is it not? The stranger's hand clutches his thighs, tries to stop. Clutches so hard he knows it must hurt, but there's nothing. The stranger won't let up.

He sits there a long time. Watches a soft shadow play in the light under the door. Hollow sounds of shuffling feet.

_Misato. _

She's listening at nothing and worried, he thought. He doesn't make a sound. Silence is sacred. Sleep, what he'll give for sleep. There aren't enough promises in the world, no coin of his worth taking to make it so.

Time passes. He stinks. He raises his hips, whips the towel away, rubs furiously at his arms to invite life back into them, sniffs his shoulders after a time in an odd doll-like bob of the chin. Cotton feels like sandpaper now. The sheets underneath are damp and inviting only because of that. They scratch less that way.

"God." A hiss of pain. His arms and face prick with sudden sweat. Eyes clamp tighter than bulkheads and he lies there, naked and weary, breathing through his mouth to get rid of the smell, churning and menstrual.

* * *

Some days later, Misato found him kneeling on the gantry like some Christian penitent just inside the bulkhead of the flooded Unit-01 hangar. Subtle, burnt scent of hardened resin clung to everything like something alive. She watches his shoulders tense at the sharp, echoless click of her boots. He looks better in-suit, healthier. She stares at the pale rim of flesh peeking from his collar, pink and painful looking. His right ear inflamed and infected.

He ignores her.

She remembers this extravagant darkness. The theatricality of it used a thousand years ago to overawe him. Cajole him. Appeal to his humanity because of the dangers in the city. She did this, coaxed him into this bullshit life with that stupid beach picture and his father's letter. Everything they do here is to goad these kids. See how far they can press and play them. It reminds her of nothing more than illegal dog fights. Keep them in cages, beat them, scream at them, twist them into something savage.

He stares out into the darkling hangar. At It.

Cold burning stars, side-by-side, floated there. Looks down at them. The beast's face, she imagines, isn't so different from a burn victim's, bandaged and bloodied. Lips burnt away, sits there and gives everyone a winning smile despite the alien calculation alight behind those deadened eyes. Somewhere in the dark overhead, a new cowl awaits the patient, dangles on ten-ton support cranes. Then, she tells herself, it won't be like we're watched.

A wet, bowel-freezing sound. Like a giant swallowing a calf backed out of the dark.

"Scary to look at it, isn't it?" she offers.

"...a bit." he replies.

"How long have you been here?"

"Long enough to consult." He throws a look over his shoulder, oddly startled at her stare. "W-What? Did I say something?" His face dry, peeling. She got a better look at his ear, swollen moist like a mushroom. He looks away quickly as kneejerk disgust moved the geography of her face.

"Feeling okay?" The steel tomb speaks her words back from a dozen bleak angles. They sound so desperate. Shinji doesn't move, stares still at the matte silhouette of his Evangelion against cavelike dark.

She walks past him a few yards onto the promenade, stands there before Evangelion. Baleful eyes lock upon her and cup her in Its senses. Its shape immense and hazily sketched against nothing. She hears bakelite pouring into the chamber from hidden flues. A light snaps on, spotlighting her in a deepening circle of black. The flues silence. Idle dripping in the deep. What does it think about? Does it know what they are?

_It knows me. _

The sudden scent of stinging ozone. She remembers. She knows It, too. Ice cracks. Teeth snap. Daddy bleeds. Bleeds on his little girl she just wanted to be a part of his life for once please daddy please -

She places a hand over the pit in her stomach and tries not to hurl her guts over the railing. For a terrific moment, she _s__ees_ those wings again, bursting from the back of the Evangelion, shattering the chamber. Reaching. Golden, electric against sky and beyond. Reaching. And then, a teeth-snapping scream erupts from those fleshless lips, soundless, a sacred note only she can hear. She deflates, the pit fades.

_All is well. All is _well.

She props her hands on the safety bar, stiffens her arms, and bows her head. She stands there a long time listening for nothing. The old, dull ache flares right beneath her breastbone. Great absences. Scar tissue flares in the cool air piping in and complains the only way it knows how. Obedient pain.

"Misato?"

She turns to him with a weary smile. When did he got so close? Shinji's patch-peeled features schooled up. The look in his eyes was knowing. Wary. Canny. Those two wet stones liquidated all other emotion. _He _knows her too. Perhaps better than most. She swallows the pang from the back of her throat.

The metallic scent of blood perfumed off of him in waves that nearly gagged her. She spits over the rail, breaks the perfect peace of the bakelite.

"Good luck today," she manages, face feeling as tight as any falsity can. He has the good grace to return her damaged sympathies. Heavy. Why a child's face could make her feel like lead, she'll never know, but it was something that ached right through the heart. Leaden and unmerciful in persistence. The heaviness of choice always demanded its price paid. A few more pounds heaped on with that look in his eyes, waiting, hoping.

"Thank you," is all he said.

"What...happened to your ear, Shinji?"

His hand slowly cupped the right, eyes horror-round as if realizing they existed for the first time. His whole face reddens as he draws two fingers across the swollen flesh. The lobe badly peels under them and coralline scabs fell from the inside of it. "N-Nothing." The wet-black sheen of blood on his fingertips.

"Tell me what this is."

"Do you think _I_ know?"

"Unless you're using all the shower time to jerk it and someone else is flaying you, I'd say you know. I don't think you've pissed Asuka off enough for her to practice field dressing yet. Shinji. Look at me."

He will not.

"Shinji, look at me."

He will not. Cow-dull and listing.

"Shinji. Look at me."

Stock still.

"Shinji. Look. At. _Me_."

Still he will not look at her.

"You run from me on this, there's no help to be had. You're not fucking _five._" _And yet I'm talking to him like he is_.

A deep, shuddering sigh from Third Children. "I can't get the smell out. I can't stop trying to get it out -"

"You're about to go into a _Plug_, Shinji. Full up of same said smell."

"I'm...I know...that's...that's okay."

"_What_."

He makes no effort to explain and ages pass before her breathing returns to normal. He leaves without saying much else. The darkness breathes with her, sucks in great mouthfuls of cold air. Mist appears in the light above every few minutes. The patient is mute, watchful, focused solely on her as she leaves. A thick red scent in the air.

She carries that weight well. Like always.

* * *

**H**-Hour. The kids will be lined up in their machines to test and here they are, sitting alone in a break room.

Cream colored walls, drink machines lined up like slot machines, tasteful rugs with geometric patterns of interlocked ovals, the ashtrays made of uniform heavy ceramic and piled with a dragon-tailed mountain of ash and dead soldiers. The smoke fragrant. Silence calms. One and one beside the other.

Noise blisters from the TV sequestered in the wall opposite them. Sent overtures of carefully weighed commercialism to this lonesome pair.

Talking heads brought the full three ring circus of political scandal rocking Parliament (third window jumper in as many months); the schizophrenic static of variety show pageantry (PSYCHICS BORN OUT OF SECOND IMPACT! HEAR WHAT GACKT HAS TO SAY!); kinetic batteries of infomercials whoring out Red Sea Pills (for all your aches and pains! Watch your body flush of poisons!); endless commercials, a vile advertisement for something called Neko Juice; mounds of exquisitely kawaii Sanrio; Beat Takeshi's _TV Tackle _roundtable on the mysterious NERV in Old Hakone (Special guest UN Ambassador Kiyoshi Asano!); the verit-

Ritsuko kills it with a gusty relieved sigh. "Finally. Someone hid the damned remote."

"Christ, _thank_ you." Misato exhales, cages her eyes against the harsh light.

The next Depth Test is all she could think about. Even with current issues, the Commander hasn't felt the need to suspend further tests. Unsurprising, but a bitter pill to swallow nonetheless. The fluorescents overhead burned her retinas. Her skull feels wedged in the maw of a six-inch machinist's vise.

"You sure you're all right?" Ritsuko asks. Misato is in no mood to talk. She does something dismissive with her fingers and Ritusko shrugs. "So be it."

"I've just got a headache is all."

"Burning the midnight oil?"

"A tanker's worth. He actually went into his room a few nights ago."

"That's...good, right?"

Misato shakes her head, slumps. "I don't rightly know. I listened at his door. He mumbled to himself a few times, talking at shadows. He didn't go to sleep for over an hour. When I opened the door he was...was just passed out on the corner of his futon, naked as the day he was born." The absurdity of the memory makes her chuckle, cut short by something approaching shame. "I don't know what to do. There he was lying down in the light.

"Have you seen his ear?"

Ritsuko hums, shakes her head, pulling out a fresh pack of 520s, tapping it against the palm of her hand. "I still think he's settling into a severe case of PTSD. I mean, look what he's been through. What we've all been through. Look what he came _back_ from. Who the hell knows what he experienced disembodied for thirty days."

"I know." Misato says.

"No, we _don't_. That's what bothers me. Who has any kind of data on this? The first attempt wasn't exactly a winner. Sato is going to have a field day with Shinji if he can get him to open up even a little. Piloting capability aside, we have no idea what this has done to his Ego or anything. His mind. Is he still showering four times a day?"

"Like the patron saint of hypochondriacs. His shins look like someone took a cheese grater too them. He's scrubbing them that hard." Her eyes feel suddenly hot. Moist. "I'm half ready to tell someone to put him in a straight jacket. He can't keep doing this. I can't watch it. Please don't give me that fucking pity look. Just don't." She bites at her thumbnail to stop the watery feeling in her lips. That sneaking quiver.

"I'm sorry. Really. This is so beyond us. Beyond me. Give me the MAGI, give me problems with the Evangelions, give me Angels, I can work with that. These kids...beyond those Entry Plugs, I've got nothing, Misato.

"My mother gave me no pointers for kids." Ritsuko says. Bitterness.

"Yeah, neither did my dad." Misato admits. "What a happy couple our parents would make. All he ever did was lockup in a lab, too. Suppose they could ignore one another there?"

Their insouciant smiles vindicate each the other. Ritsuko sits down, heavy as a burlap sack of bones, sighing, lighting a fresh cigarette.

"I'm dreaming a lot lately." Misato says, sips at tepid coffee.

"Oh?"

"Yeah," she laughs. "I dream I'm sleeping over in dad's townhouse. The one that used to be in Chofu. Remember Jikei University?"

"The medschool? He lived near there?"

"Yeah, not five blocks from the campus. Anyway, I dream I'm lying there in my bed. Room's pitch black and so frigging barren because I always refused to bring my things over there. Just an empty little sandalwood dresser recessed into the wall, this diamond-shaped mirror sitting above it, empty closet, and my stupid Hello Kitty - you start laughing, I will_ hit_ you - my stupid little Hello Kitty Gameboy. Pile of clothes in one corner...all of it's there."

"Sanrio fetish much? You should talk with Maya sometime."

"I mean, that _never_ leaves this room. We've seen what Maya's fetishes turn into. What? You _know _I'm right."

Ritsuko glares darkly, "I know." And let go of her laughter. "Maya's special. Go on."

Misato watches her lazy smoke rings. "I'm there in the dark, hand draped over the edge of the bed, and I just feel something tugging at my hand. These fingers.' - she holds up her index and ring fingers - 'I'm awake. And the door slowly slides open and the tugging gets worse. Like it's trying to jerk my shoulder out of its socket. Take me somewhere, I dunno. And I'm just lying there like it's no big thing." She sips at her coffee.

"That's weird, yeah. Doesn't seem to be all that bad, though."

"You can't really extenuate the circumstances of what always comes next," and explained the rest of the dream.

"Ah." Ritsuko says, staring at Misato, taking a long drag of the slim. They sit silently a long time. "I dunno what to tell you. Nightmares."

"Yeah, nightmares."

* * *

"How do you feel, Shinji?" Misato's face is bright and wide, encompassing the central holographic display. Her eyes crisp with sharp resolution, he feels as though he could count the little flecks of green there. Harsh amber light defines the plug. Everything else appears in absence of that light. A soft world of shadows.

"Okay, I guess." He says. When did he step into the plug? There is a blank spot in his memory there. Recollection escapes. Like a soothing balm the LCL quells all the pain and irritation racking his body. A static charge lights his limbs, prickles skin, and sets him on edge. Something is off, though what he cannot say.

"Good, good." Misato yawns in crisp 1080p. "How do you feel?"

"Better. Always feels better in water." He says, trying to make the jitters stop. "I-I'm a little nervous."

She notices his discomfort. "Is it because of the closed-in space?" There is truth there, but only from her point of view. All those little reports. The very papers of subjective objectivity. Heh, the thought makes his head hurt for a minute. But there's a point there. He knows how blind Misato can be to things. She is never in his room when he's in there...other things make him jump and skittish in the dark, too.

"Because of the closed-in space, yeah." he lies. He can feel _It_; one can always tell when someone is watching.

"Okay. Just breathe. Normal test, right? You'll be out soon enough, okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah, that works." The plug hums alive. The LCL energized by turns boiling prismatic, spouting gunmetal chutes, then becoming clear. It thickens, pushes wholly into his lungs, chews a mouthful of iron filings. The odd sensation of being filled. Atavistic fear of choking in one's sleep screams upward only to falter as he remembers - chants - 'I can breathe, I can breathe'. Little clouds whirl around him, sucked away into filters somewhere behind him.

_So tired. _A pleasant weight settles on his chest, seeps inside him, under his eyelids, and the seat became unbearably comfortable. "Dammit," he curses, jerking, favoring his right ear. Lowers his chin to his left shoulder, tries to focus. Everything is an inevitable toll. Ledgers remain open somewhere beyond the walls of this plug, and his debts are great. _So tired_. A great bearlike yawn dumps into a blackout. He shifts and struggles for proper placement. Soon, a deep shroud overcomes him.

He dreams.

Dreams of delicate hands wringing out a dishrag over a steaming sink. Of the sandcastle he built on the beach when the world was still young.

* * *

Dull sonic beeps wake him. The suit's inlaid timer, implacable amber numbers toll the hour on his wrist. Sluggish, heavy. His eyes flutter once, twice, desperate to open all the way. Blankness is what eventually rips his eyes open. The screens are dead. Static pulses within the LCL made his skin crawl. Flashes of light and needling pain with each movement. Something taps the hull of the plug.

In that hazy waking moment with the world finite and transparent to the eye, he witnesses something move just below the screens. Sinuous and rabbit-like, almost shy. Just a shadow of movement, black against the orange LCL. Little cigarette burn eyes, that shift chameleon-like to green, then a brilliant blue. It _move__s_.

Closer. Into the light. Like a hollowed out shape of a person cast from filmy soapscum. Shaped itself like clay before him to be softer now, curved, womanly. Clotted tendrils of transparent hair grow. Its face strangely smooth and without feature. Something familiar about it itched in the root of his teeth. Gracile hands reach out for him.

Tap, tap, tap on the hull.

More curious than alarmed, he sat still and stared back at the two little sapphire points shining there in nothing.

Closer. River-rapid hands caress his abraded skin and he knows bliss.

* * *

A/N: Sideris uses Massive Revision! It's mostly effective! Many thanks to Mashadar giving this a once over and to you, the readers, when you guys get a chance to read this.


	2. Ravenous

Disclaimer: The author does not own the Neon Genesis Evangelion IP. They ask, this goes.

* * *

Iokaste Ravenous

Quiet and strangely peaceful, this room is the lake she visited in her youth.

Same old messy desk, it reminds her of the cluttered docks. Books like hills. Documents whisper as quietly as a child's flipbook. Rain sheets hard against the windows. Misato sits there dumbly, hands numb and unwilling to pick up the pen and write needless things that go unheeded. She upends Yebisu down the stovepipe. A sound catches her attention. She cranes back with a sigh, leans on the arm rests.

"Shinji?"

The door slides soundlessly open.

No knock, not one, and the phantom door frames a deep blackness without. For a moment, shuddering images of mountains appear against a paper skyline only to fade away. Soundless peals of thunder, more felt than heard, shake the desk, and papers flutter as if twittering at some secret jest. She sits there, watches, smiles. Spiderlegs of lightning crawl across that sky whose terminus is unknown beyond the porthole doorway.

She waits and there is soon nothing to see. Black on black shadows swirling around. A cool breeze washes over her and she knows. Knows a presence waits out there. Something observing her. Something in the black that neither sight nor hearing nor reason can behold and comprehend. A formless _if. _Watching and waiting, waiting and watching. Her hands fall aside, asleep and crawling with the sensation of needles.

"Hello? ...Daddy?" she asks. Hopes.

Transfixed, she stares into this writhing dark, all light pitched aside and forgotten. Her hand jerks as if tied to a string. Everything slows down, her breathing, her heart becomes dull thuds in the inner ear. She is a clockwork doll wearing stolen skin and no key exists to wind her back up. Ephemeral as lighted mountains beyond the door, soon swallowed up. Little fingers tug at the root of her thoughts, the familiarity within seemed wholly alien here and now.

"Daddy?"

Thickly clotted blood spatters her cheek. A singular figure shapes itself out of the dark and steps into the cramped, sterile room like something best left undisturbed. Still he's painted black in dried blood and favoring a shattered left leg. Good hand open in episodic compassion. One eye swollen shut and seeping jelly, the other wild with emotion.

"Dad?" she asks. Hopes. It's cold. The blood seeps into her mouth. The doll winds down. She feels loose. Limbs held aloft by wires federated solely to keeping her body whole.

The breeze retreats, swallowed up by covetous shades. The black firmament latticed with lightning and a brighter glow not unlike a sunrise tinged prismatic. An eruption.

"...Daddy?"

The door whispers shut and all the suffocating hands of darkness wrap round her throat.

* * *

It was an image-it never existed.

"Sounds like a bad one." Ritsuko says, propped up in her chair, mopping her face with a rag. They're spectators today, little else. Machinery grinds away below. Heat stifles as heavy duty repairs continue in the bays below them; air thick with the nauseating smell of burning power lines and mig welders even up there. The air tastes of metal filings, a deep black iron taste. The ground trembles beneath them as heavy loaders and cranes and the mammoth crawlers mill like blind ants.

"You could say that," Misato replies. "Kids were standing outside my door, deer-in-headlights eyes. I'd been screaming...or something."

"Mm, still not as weird as that one you told me about a few weeks ago."

"No, but bad enough. I haven't dreamed about...that night in a long, _long_ time." Misato walks along the triple-thick panoramic window overlooking the launch bays. "That I remember, I guess."

"Was about to say. You probably dream about Second Impact a lot. Simply don't remember it in the morning. Your mind files it away, nice and tight. I don't know. I'm not your shrink."

"Actually, you are. I don't get paid enough to afford one."

"Bullshit, yes you do. You just don't want anyone poking around in your head." Ritsuko joins her at the window. "So, aside spooking your wards, how are they?"

"Same. Shinji's healing up, dialing back the obsessive compulsive. His skin isn't all fucked up or smelling like dishwater. A few weeks of rest and showering like a normal person do wonders, apparently. Still, though, he's...off. Sato won't say much, reports from his office go directly to the Commander. And that's as much a dead end as any. Hands are tied."

Reefs of welding smoke drift across the hangar. "Mmm, your reports have been a bit sparse. Asuka?"

"Same. Same tension between her and Shinji. Same avoidance of one another. He doesn't even rise to her bait. Lost in another universe and that only pisses her off more. I don't know what to do. They don't see it. It's quite clear: they need to get a room."

Ritsuko gestures with her chin at the milling mass of worker ants below. "They've nearly got the platforms switched out." Monstrous crawler-transporters below wheel the football-field-sized replacement launch catapult into place like some crown jewel used in reverent coronation.

"Seems we're dragging ass in the repair department." Misato says. There are still deep rends in the walls above the heavy lifters where the Fourteenth's face had been buried into the duct. She remembers. All lit up like a magnesium flare and screaming like slaughtered cattle when she gave the launch order. A sudden grainy taste of sweat on her tongue, hears Shinji shouting.

'_Misato!' _

'_Launch catapult four!' _

"Snap out of it," she mutters. She stands in the overlook, not in a crumbling war room.

Ritsuko's laughter gently reels her away from darker thoughts. "Yes, well, when half the workforce abandons ship every attack, it's hard to get people back in. Even promises for the GDP of several small nations and Starbucks' net worth in recompense doesn't bring them running back."

"Well, can't spend it when you're dead."

"Truer words have never been spoken. At least the bridge is fully repaired."

"Yeah, our mighty trio complain that without the hole, there's no good draft keeping them cool."

"Ha! Bullshit." Ritsuko turns away laughing, shakes her head. "I guarantee they twisted Maya's arm in playing along with it. Hyuuga and Aoba act like sad puppies without her getting in on the kill."

"Actually, she's been crying the loudest."

"Really? ...huh." Ritsuko says. "Misato? Hello, Misato, welcome to earth."

"Huh? Oh, uh, she's as okay as she shows. I dunno. She's _your_ protege, you tell me. They've all withdrawn since the Fourteenth. We're all on edge." Misato looks up and finds the beginnings of accusation and looks away. "I'm _fine_."

"Still a piss poor liar."

"Only for you."

"_Look_." Pressing on. "I understand there's a _lot_ of strange things occurring under your roof. And it's affecting everything we do here: your own work and the kids'. And this cannot stand. Now I want Shinji healthy and a bit more tightly screwed in the head, but that's just not reality at the moment." Ritsuko pauses. "We've all got a job to do. And I will offer up whatever help I can. But when it comes to Shinji's mental state...we're not miracle workers. Like I said before, post-traumatic is never easily overcome. This...this is different."

Silence for some time. Abruptly, Misato gets up to leave, face screwed tight. Ritsuko catches her up easily. They walk down to the elevators.

"'Give me the MAGI,'" intones Misato, "'give me Angels, give me Eva.'" Pensive.

"Close, but not in that order and I said it with a bit more kindness, Major."

"I'm sorry. I just...have no idea where to go with any of this right now."

Their journey to NERV HQ promenade is five minutes up from the hangar trench and every second is spent in a yawning, uncomfortable silence. Not a word is said when they arrive, only a shared unknowable look between the two and the going of separate ways. Much the same as it has always been.

* * *

Shinji settles down under the shade of an old elm, damning the hitch in his side.

Leftovers from the last depth test, he tells himself. The impressions of delicate fingers cupping his cheek. Odd, indecipherable images in his head. The mercury hangs at 37 and he's mopping his face clean of sweat. His shirt like a second skin, adhering a thousand times better than neoprene. Lunch unappetizing where a few minutes ago it had been mouth-watering in the air conditioning. All of this vaguely pleases him.

"Hey, hey!" Aida ambles up with a smile plastered on that whimsical face; a knowing face. His cheeks and upper lip beads with sweat, but it never dulls his spirits.

Shinji wonders what it'll be like with his absence, too. Too many things had changed. Kensuke would be gone soon, he knew, never for each to see the other again. That he knew, too. The Aida family had decided to simply quit the city and all concomitant misfortunes. Everyone has their limits. Kensuke's was the loss of Suzuhara, whose burial months ago left deep wounds the studentry still barely coped with. The memorial in the front hall saw a few fresh flowers every Monday. Everyone had lost family and friends.

Aida bore it with rude good humor, the only one to do so, perhaps fittingly so. He certainly didn't miss a beat haunching down, camera in hand. Says: "To be honest, Shinji, you look like hammered shit."

"Thanks, Kensuke." Shinji replies. "Really."

"Anytime." Futzing with the camera, he goes about making a show of checking ages of old footage-his history-muttering incoherent bewilderment at all forgotten times saved therein. "You do look better...honestly."

He favored Kensuke a wan smile. "Misato says the same. I dunno...I've felt better. Kinda. It's weird."

"Oh, trust me. We all know. People were scared for you." He claps another disc in. "I know I was. You kinda-literally-almost fell apart."

"Thanks."

"Mmm," he says. "I am what I am. A helper of sorts." They sit in silence for a while. Then, "So you okay?"

"I guess. Don't smell, at least...I think. My nose is clogged. Feel like I'm getting sick. Actually sick. Ears are healing. Mika and her friends hoot at me again when they're up at the pool."

Kensuke laughs, pinwheeling the Featherlight against his palms. "They do love that, don't they? You got a lot of fans in class. Girls are suckers for mopers. Not so much mopers with leprosy, though. So it's good you're healing up. They cry out to you more than bishoujo chicks wanting to heal their love's 'dark and troubled' soul! You could do a cameo on Fushigi Yuugi or be some moe icon for school."

Shinji couldn't have been more disturbed if Kensuke grew a great green eye out of his skull. His hand spasms on the ground next to him, hard up against his hip and he desperate to hide it. The old nerves acting up as a strange desperation takes hold of him. Shinji says: "About before...with Touji..."

Flint. "Don't bring it up again. ...'sall I'm asking. You can't keep apologizing. No clue why you are. If you did-or if you were... No. I dunno what to say other than: drop it, Shinji. Sage advice."

"Yeah. Yeah..."

His lunch is spoiling right under his nose out in the open in this heat. So strong as to be cloying. Shinji feels lightheaded suddenly. Whispered words slither out his lips, add, "I'm lonely." And goes unheard.

"Okay, so, I'm going camping again soon before we move. Wanna come?"

Shinji said nothing. Squatting there under woven branches, looking away.

* * *

In the panorama of Tokyo-03, brilliant chrome and glass denotes absence of life and a stark uniformity. The 'scrapers and reflecting towers ordered like good soldiers in their neat formations. Sterility is the security blanket of the new world, the patina that coats all the old souls and new. It speaks for its people, like all cities do: leave your old baggage behind, embrace the present. Perhaps the _only_ impetus fueling restoration of the city after each attack. It must be _perfect._

The mind lets go and forgets that things are as bad as they are. Death waits. Pandemonium lurks round every corner. It's simpler to rebuild and, miraculously, forget. Their ward against reality, this city. Everyone of them.

For some people that is: "Kaji, look, would you please listen? No, I don't want to meet up tonight. God, just forget your dick for once. I've got things to-okay, I'll wait. Ass." She stops at Coffee-Kiosk no.4009, same as every other one in every other bustling Japanese city. The usual two sugars, and an inordinate amount of time waiting for Kaji's mouth to spit out meaningful words. She hears dim cavelike sounds over the phone, a soft tapping, hears the muffled cicadic sounds of passersby around her. "You on the tramway?"

He cut her short. Pulling the receiver from her mouth, she mouths out a litany of unkind words that dare not be spoken right now.

She wants someone to talk to, not be summarily ignored by. She knows him well enough to hear the tension in his voice, shedding all lackadaisical airs for something else. _Too close, Ryoji, too close. _This Mulder act will get him killed. A sheath of black plastic is all that's waiting for him at the end.

She thinks he knows that, too.

Private devastation. She's tried to tell him. This is how things were and would always be. Then come nights of quiet denials. To one another, to their futures, themselves. She didn't have the heart to have beat this dead horse.

He comes back.

"Hey. No, I know you're bu-, look, can I just have five minutes? Do you know what's been going on? Yeah. Yeah, he's a little better. Healing, at least. Seems you are as well informed as you claim. Well. You've been full of shit before."

Trundling down an alley in the throes of renovation. Here, a chic downtown bar; there, loft apartments in (already) abandoned storefronts secreted away from the orderly stagnation. Outside, glossy neon signs and covered walkways blooming on the streets as the sun begins to set. They speak in one voice: _all will be normal and right soon_. She mutters meaningless reassurances. The tatters of her dreams play at the edges of her thoughts, half-seen, like the vestigial horrors they are.

He speaks to her. "What? No. No, it's all strange now."

* * *

Shinji's Lovely Suite is abloom with cyanose light. The moon hanging full. Laying his head back down on the lumpy pillow. Shinji hears, or thought he heard, the soft patter of feet in the hall. Nothing else moves for a long time. No closing of doors, no sleep-addled mumbling, no Pen-Pen, no nothing. Only soft sounds of his own breathing.

He sleeps.

* * *

He wakes, levers himself up on his elbows. Strange dreams pull him to consciousness and he believes, like all dreamers gargling out of a certain sort of nightmare, that there's someone in the room with him. But every corner is vacant, every silly-yet-serious worry of bogeymen under the bed banished, every shadow soft and comforting from diffused moon's glow through the slitted blinds. Air soughing through the room, like cold wind in a cave.

He lies back down and presses his hands together and passes them down over his nose and mouth, deeply exhaling all the while. It's hard to sleep, like, he's some kind of insomniac now. All wired up and heavily bagged eyes. He is not uncomfortable, quite the opposite. The bunched up sheet wicks away sudden sweat breaking out on his arms and chest. Strange that, it's cold enough to see tiny plumes of breath. An umber darkness backlit by God's own spotlight shines in the window.

_I'm getting sick again. _

Hands search the floor below the bed, earlier dream-laden fears forgotten, grabs his shirt, mops his face clean of sweat. The ceiling seems lower. The room distorts and stretches as if he's looking at it through fish eyes. The ceiling drops further still, the air crushing itself against his chest. Eyes flutter shut.

* * *

**ABSOLUTION**

* * *

Wakes up.

Sweat soaks the pillow and Shinji, for a split second, senses that dreamlike presence. Gone now. Spindly limbs, unfolding precision. Wasn't that it?

* * *

**HUNGER**

* * *

Something tickles at the base of his spine. It is there in the corner, unfolding as he imagined.

A strange movement, suddenly, a human hand made of ashen dream. Beckoning fingers curl with such promises. Eyes like lapis and floating over him now. The room wheels.

The shadow's hands are kind and know him like his own.

Soft orange comfort wraps around him. Familiar, constant. The voice sounds like railcross warnings.

* * *

Sometime later, he gasps aloud an old, forgotten name.

* * *

His face nuzzles yielding flesh. The curve of a breast, warm and lovely, molds against his cheek. So vivid in taste.

_Where am I? _

His tongue darts out to taste flesh as soft and pliable as clay. Distant sighing, the quickening of fingers, rocking hips.

See the lonely child. Hear his plaintive whines. Panting furnace-hot breaths. He is sprawled across his bed in an obscene, almost feminine pose. Listen to the secretive voices not unlike those heard down a darkened hall, or the room next door, or doubts alone from the inner ear. Everything runs into the narrow grooves of single-minded lust and is soon forgotten.

"Please, please, quicker..."

All whispered nonsense to those watching blue eyes, observing every flex of the tiny muscles sloughing around pained eyes. Every nuance measured and remembered. He spends himself on the coverlet and lies there sucking in great lungfuls of air; softly, he secrets words heavy with a child's meaningless importance to the empty air. Spent, he slips away into darkness.

* * *

**EXIT**

* * *

**EXIT**

* * *

**EXIT**

* * *

"_Why is he here? Yui. Why is Shinji here? We have work to do."_

Conflicting emotions. He was a soft child, then, worked by many hands. No choices given to him, only guidance. No one saw it, and even he didn't understand fully until the age of reason.

"_Yui."_

Softly, always softly, "Because he belongs here. Let us proceed, please. Stay here, treasure. Stay here." Was it always this way? Part of him thinks so. Thought so, even then. Beyond acknowledged thought, past barriers thicker than blood, a luminous being divested of its origins; something wholly new, man-forged and horrific, those eyes like wet sapphires. He watched its birth.

And nothing more.

* * *

All empty spaces. All quiet as graves, much like Shinji's Lovely Suite.

Suddenly: The lump on the bed wakes, sleep-dazzled, leaps from soiled sheets, darts around with panicked energy. The alarm was never set. Biting down a flare of self-recrimination, he looks dazedly around the barren room. Light seeps through the blinds. He dresses quickly and wipes the crud out of his eye when he comes up short to the scene in the dining room.

"Um, hey." He says. "Sorry I didn't get anything cooked. My alarm..." Sweaty palms smooth wrinkles in his shirt. "What's...up?"

Neither woman replies. Asuka digs at her bowl of cornflakes with gusto, pretends he's not even there. The fine fingers of her left hand stenos texts as the right steam-shovels breakfast home. Misato stares, adopting that perpetually bemused aspect that colored everything she did, looking almost through him, as though he were a windowpane. Strange tension wrings the air. Too much to drink last night?

Three faces freighted with indifference. Shinji stands there, not knowing whether to go or to speak. Every noise outside grows distant, as if the apartment has been submerged, and every thump of the heart grows louder. Every blink a shutter's hollow click.

"Misato?"

Finally the spell breaks and she forces a smile, dim shadow of her normal self. "Mmm, nothing, Shinji. You guys are going to be late if you don't get to it. Want a ride?"

Asuka snorts, incomprehensibly mutters.

"No, thanks," he says, tugs and adjusts the satchel's strap, fidgeting under still present scrutiny in Misato's eyes. "Gonna walk, I think. You comin', Asuka? I can make lunch, if you-"

"Go ahead, dweeb, I'm eating." Looks askance at him. "I'll get something small for lunch or whatever." Shinji stands there, dumbfounded.

Abruptly, her fingers pause, awaiting the phone's sonic bee sting, go right on typing a response, giving the screen only a moment's consideration. Radiating decisive manner, the Second shot him a momentary, inexplicably angered glare.

Utterly forgetting his own lunch, heavy feet go as commanded, and feeling he's slipped outside the net of some greater strangeness, Shinji comes back to himself on the stairs. Floors and stairwells of walking lost to such indecipherable confusion. Air chokes and the sun, already a white brand behind a screen of buildings, unsettles him deeply.

Their gimlet eyes, burned into his brain, chase him still down dawn-whitened streets.

* * *

"Hey, Third! Hey!" Asuka calls. "What the hell? Wait up! God, you run the whole way here? It's three blocks and you left, like, five minutes ago!" She comes running up out of the haze like a dim memory. Those pale cheeks flushed with exertion, forehead studded with sweat. Something about her glare makes everything seem small. That watery gaze cups him in the palm of some greater scrutiny and made Ikari another worm, something to be dissected.

Inscrutable Asuka speaks to him and he can't hear a word of it. Curious disassociation from here and now settles over him with chilling alacrity_. _Not thinking, Shinji dwells in last night and all that happened therein. Like a dream taking shape years later with a strange sense of _deja vu_, he slips away.

Asuka pauses at some point, stepping forward and stabbing an accusatory finger at his chest. "Why are you smiling? Don't even _think_ of gloating, idiot. You think beating me to _school_ is some kind of victory? Dead wrong."

She realizes she's being ignored and the switch is flipped. The geography changes in Asuka's face, laughs darkly. The space between them closes like the jaws of a vise. The sudden closeness and threat in her face breaks the private dream world Shinji enjoyed. His back pricks with sweat; Asuka's glare squeezes it from him like a wet rag. He shrinks. She encompasses.

"You think you can do it all, can't you?" she says. "Well, I'll tell you what, you're nothing. Nothing! Just some-...All God's little favors dropping in your lap because of daddy. You...God, I will-" Carnival shows of anger. For what? Months ago the lesson of Shinji Ikari being beneath the contempt of Asuka Soryu was _well_ learned.

_It's Monday_, he thinks. It's moments like this where Shinji doesn't know her. Whether speaking German or lashing out at him or circumstance, she becomes as remote from him as islands sitting on midnight oceans.

"-to me! I said, 'what were you doing last night?'" Blue eyes flash, crisp and a touch cold as autumnal mornings. Her breath feels like chips of ice, she's so close. Blue eyes.

"Excuse me?"

Blue.

"You heard me. Rather...I heard _you_. You kept murmuring to yourself last night." says Asuka. Closer to him now, she smells of that sickeningly sweet skin creme whisked away in her cosmetics case. Thick droplets of sweat race down the groove of his back. Those blues beckon. He feels those hands running over slopes of skin; hears again whispered promises; smells tongue-wetted skin.

Eyes.

She's too close, she knows him. _So like Her, _he thinks.

"I heard you," she says, "whispering to yourself, pumping one out. Thinking of your little doll? Mmm? That get you hot?" The derisive smirk comes now, full of echoed vim and verve that she possessed once. Something slithers underneath it, frightens Shinji. There's no real anger in her words now. He can see the bags under her eyes. The nervous twitch in her pose. Something all to familiar.

Blue.

Last night.

"I don't know what you're talking about." He finally says, turns, walks away as quickly as one foot in front of the other, yes sir.

Eyes.

"Liar!" Disappointment. Rushing steps, a finely fingered hand spins him around. "I _heard_ you."

"I don't know what you're talking about!"

Closer. His hand won't stop twitching. There's something warm to touch.

"Heard. I did. Even your freakin'...fuckin'...you _came_, you pervert. Gasping out someone's name. Who was-what the-don't_ touch_ me!"

And then he was running, running as if life itself hangs in the balance. Wishing for it all to go away. Wishing that the bewildered, sullen look on Asuka's face would fade away. Wishing that he knew sleep again. Wondering if this is all a dream. That lean mixture. _What's going on? _

Each running step punctuated by great whooping breaths. Constant choruses of "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," follow him, but he hears them not. All he can see or hear is a constant series of images, of dreams. Assaulting his senses like a haze of carrion flies.

* * *

"_It's empty. There's nothing left."_

"_Wrong. Everything. Everything is right here."_

* * *

Misato threads the car through traffic like a needle. Sheer panic. A dizzying moment of unreality as the horizon shifts, the solar collection towers trace the setting sun, gathering the last rays of the day, blinding her in a flare of amber light. The cars blur by glazed.

The fool speaks uninterrupted on the other end of the line.

"I don't give a shit where he's gone, you follow! Your heads are up your asses so often, I figure you're being paid to count corn instead of watch our pilots! Oh, problem? Take it up the chain of command; for now, _Lieutenant,_ standing orders are find the Third Children. _Do it!_"

_Fucking Section Two. _

Misato ignores the deliberate tick working through her arm, the muscles jump, ache. Gone again.

_This isn't happening. _Car horns blare with wheeling distances. The sky cants. _This isn't fucking happening again._

* * *

One can never find what hides in plain sight.

In due time, maybe, the eye will adjust to see but never right away. There is time, Shinji knows, to flee and find surcease. There will be time. Time made is time earned. His bowels feel loose, watery, his insides shifting with each numbing step. Skin buzzes. Everything moves on automatic, taking him somewhere far-away. He is a shadow among diffident masses. Their noise a tangible thing, sea-like, like blood hammering in his ears. Clips a lamppost trying to avoid a cluster of salarymen waiting at a crosswalk. It does little to stop him. And all there is is questions, unending questions. What was he doing back there?

White-knuckled fingers clench at the memory of skin shuddering under his touch. Coltish tic. He touched Asuka. His fingers moved over linen skin, invoking fury and something else. Something like last night. Lust.

'_Treasure.'_

Soon, his running feet reveal more than any words or recollection.

* * *

Some time later, he's elsewhere. A filthy alley covered in pools of still water thick with blooms of algae. An entire bag of fetid rags, he hides here. He feels her seeking him out always, always. A pall cast on addled thoughts. Just some sleep, it's all he needs, all he wants. His cell phone! Call Misato, call Section Two, someone, anyone. His skin feels feverish and dull to the taste.

Contacts spin around on the screen fruit machine-like until flickering lights at the dark end of the alley catch his eye.

Those blue eyes, wet as lapis. They find him kneeling there behind a dumpster. He sees her standing in chiaroscuro, painted fingers beckoning him. Flashing eyes. Braced against the dumpster, banging his head again and again to exorcise the delicious promises. Shinji feels her already flowing through him.

"Stop. Stop. _Stop_. I can't do this anymore." He says.

"_Treasure."_ It-_She_-replies.

And those hands reach for Shinji with filial warmth. But beneath it, he knows, is more; an animal hunger. And then she's there beside him, kneeling down. All the fight runs out of him just like that. A very feminine hand caresses his cheek and a deep red lust ignites in him. It cares. Who else ever did? It wants him home and right soon. He could be lost inside her forever.

"What are you doing to me?" he moans.

She's so warm and leans in to whisper.

'_Home. I want you to come home.'_

* * *

"Uh-huh. This is _Shinji_ we're talking about, right? Okay okay okay. Jesus. All right, have the agents you're with take you to Horaki's or some-" Misato glances at the incoming call. "Shit. Okay, yeah, yeah, I'm listening. I need to go. Just have them drop you off, we'll talk in a bit, okay?" She takes the next exit ramp and idles the Renault at a stoplight rail crossing.

"Do that, yeah. Gotta go. Might be about Shinji." Down the newly paved road on the left lie the rail stations. All shut down, their signs blinking away all transit. She keys the incoming through.

"Katsuragi. Yeah, go ahead, Hyuga."

Before her, without any fuss, the tram booms lower. Nothing moves in or out of station.

"Wait, wait, wait, he's _where_? They said he vanished around Soho. Then how did he make it to headquarters so quickly? And he used his clearance card. Why wasn't it flagg-never mind."

The warning lights begin to flash and the bells rack up a senseless, eerie clamor. An uncomfortable tremor works down her spine at the confusion on the other side of the phone.

"The hell? Um, no, look, just send security to get him and I'll be there in fifteen, okay? No, Makoto, just send security. Something's up. Tell ya later."

_Misato?_

She checks left, then right and nothing to be seen but the platform and an empty, silent train and many miles of uninhabited tracks. The booms slowly rise up and the bells cease. Shifts into gear. Shinji's face floated in her mind's eye as it did this morning, tired, confused, troubled. And the sounds she had heard and the disturbing smell of sex, actual fucking, when she snuck by his door that morning...

"This weird goddamned city."

* * *

He had closed his eyes when She hugged him, and suddenly he was in the hangar of Unit-01.

Nothing is said, nothing _was_ said. No sense of transit, just a noise. A loud wet kissing sound in his inner ear and he was senseless. And here he stands looking up and up at his war machine, still encased in bakelite, the air tinged with ozone and the strange waxy scent of burning plastics. How time passes.

She's next to him, all translucent skin and as she wends around him in a strange dance, her foaming outline like an oil slick shifting chameleon-like with all the colors of the rainbow. Here She is yellow tinged red, now orange, and here She turns gunmetal like the sea. LCL-like.

'_Come home, darling boy. Delicate boy.' _She says.

"I-I don't-"

'_It's where you belong. It's what you want. It's what you need. I can give you everything that this place never could, or wanted to.'_A prismatic hand reaches out. _'Come home, Treasure, come home. To me.' _

"But...what... Are you real?"

'_Come into me and find out.'_

"Into?" He looks back at Eva. Realization. "_You_. I've...felt you before. You're the one in there with me? When I was trapped?" A dull ache pegs him right behind his eyes. "You're what screams inside my head... Why did you make me sick?"

A burst of static from overhead, the com system. "Ikari Shinji," says the announcer. "Third Children, stay where you are. Security is on it's way to escort you out of the chamber. Debrief in fifteen. Stay where you are. Do not approach the Evangelion any further."

He looks around wildly, seeing the red-beret-wearing khaki-clad security agents carefully approaching him from either side, throwing their own wary glances at the Evangelion. The stories of the machine moving on its own to protect its pilot are _well_ know throughout NERV. One of them has a taser at the ready, her face pensive and not a bit nervous. Do they see Her as well? He looks at Her. She simply stands there, smiles at him with lips like water.

"Step toward us, Ikari. Please." says the lead agent, holding out his hand, a bright pair of handcuffs dangling on his belt.

They are afraid of him. He remembers, dimly, what happened after the Thirteenth and how he had shattered this place. _They're afraid of a repeat_, he thinks.

He looks at Her and feels a strange tugging in his chest. Her eyes warm and welcoming. _Yes. Yes I would. _But he moves toward the guards. Slowly, looking back and into the middle-distance.

Security debriefings will later reveal that the guards on the opposite side of the pilot noticed him watching a single point on the catwalk the entire time, even as he was lead away. And when taken to the doors, he mouthed something.

"I want back in."

* * *

"So."

Misato stands just inside the steel-edged door frame of the cell. Her ward stares at the floor as normal in these situations. It's a good sign. Misato sweeps her hair up into a tight elastic, arms working as fast as possible. The silence is what always bothers her. And the fact that this is, what, three times in the brig for him? In a very vague and not-so-disappointing way, it pleases her. He can act things out like an actual teen sometimes.

But right now, it's nearly as grave as his attack on headquarters itself. He's slipping mentally.

"Wanna tell me about it?"

Long, dark silence, perfect. He gives nothing. That, too, is typical. She sighs; she can smell him. Healing or not, he smells like a dumpster. A strong yellow scent like old newspapers.

No luck, time to press on: "At least you're acting closer to normal right now than you have been lately. What's going on, Shinji?" All those walls her father built in the worst times are something intrinsic she finds in Shinji. _All the men in my life are you._

"Rhetorical, isn't it? I'm not here to talk to myself." It's nice in a way. She hasn't felt quite this foolish in some time.

Shinji, she thinks, maybe feels more the fool. "I just don't feel okay." He says.

"That's putting it lightly, kiddo."

Mouths something at the floor.

"What was that?"

"Nothing," he says, looks at her. Gives a shy, half-hearted, wholly Shinji smile and it feels like someone's pissed on her grave and those chapped lips widen a little more. A strange cataract of seconds passes; he expands, she contracts. For a fleeting yet palpable moment, Misato Katsuragi feels dwarfed by Shinji Ikari. But he says nothing, does nothing untoward. Just a feeling. No true threat is offered, only this sudden serenity.

_What?_

Silence stretches. After the awkward pause and recollection of calm, she feels ready to continue her interrogation, trying to shake the pit in her stomach. What's wrong here? _Save it, Katsuragi, move on. _The tension grips and holds between the stomach and heart, turns to ice. She uses it, squares her shoulders.

"Okay." She says. "Please, Shinji. Tell me what's going on. You won't talk to Ritsuko, you won't talk to Sato, and we can all see something is wrong. Talk, I'll listen. You know that, right?"

"No." The painful looking smile fades from him, dies out in his eyes first. Like wet river stones. Stares off into middle distance again. "I don't know, anymore."

"_Talk_ to me."

"..._mustn't run away..._"

When she steps closer to him, the icy feeling deepens, an electrical psychic moment tells her to quit the room. He simply sits there on the bench, mouths the old mantra, staring at the opposite corner where nothing but shadows stand. Looking there at those shadows raises a fine carpet of gooseflesh along her arms. Distantly, she hears thunder, imagines sheets of lightning across the backs of distant mountains.

A roar. A dome of light. Impossible wings reaching to the heavens.

A moment of unreality and she _feels_ blood dripping on her face again. Yes, all those years ago.

_Dad?_

Taking a deep breath, closing her eyes, she focuses on Shinji's nearly manic mantra-cum-prayer. She settles. Back to work, soldier. Any further attempts to get his attention go ignored. All words are weak and fruitless. Misato reaches out to touch his arm, but thinks better of it, pulls away.

The oft-remembered thunder rolls on to the ends of the earth deep in her mind.

"It'll be okay, Shinji. It'll...be okay."

"..._mustn't run away...mustn't run away..._"

* * *

It is quiet here in the dark. Misato's left him, turned out all the lights. They all leave in the end. He's trying to not scream at the sensation of fingers spidering up his legs two by two.

Her eyes hover before him, lifeless and unmoving, like twin stars.

* * *

**SOLD OUT**

Inexorably, the message crawls across the Quu LCD, and strikes a final match to the lamp oil pouring out of Ritsuko Akagi's mouth.

"How the fuck can I _reach_ him, Ritsuko? Watching him recede from the world more and more like this. God." Misato downs the third palm-wet cup of coffee, tries to will the shakes from her hands. A caged animal. That is what her ward was slowly becoming. The pressures of all the fighting, all the decisions; time trapped inside Evangelion Unit-01 must be effecting his mind to the point of insanity.

No need for Ritsuko's talk of ego borders and plug depths and other Greek.

"Even if _is_ the issue... I dunno. A closed ward?" Misato shakes her head. That road of thought took her down too many familiar paths.

"Sensitive issue or not, something's gotta be done, Misato. He'll fall out at this rate." Ritsuko says. "Too dangerous in all probability. Putting him in a Plug will either kill us all when he snaps at the controls of a demigod warmachine. No." She looks incredibly drawn as if the news of Third Children's decline has sucked the meat from her bones.

"Would _you_ talk with him?"

"Me? No. Look, you've got your issues to deal with as guardian and Operations Director..." She palms her cell phone and holds in both hands as if she'd know the weight of it. "...like the safety of us all. Call can wait-anyway, we've had this discussion a dozen times when he was still manageable, okay? Now he's in the brig after more than a month of erratic behavior and sickness. It can't be helped.

"He can stay in there for now."

* * *

"..._want to go home_..." Home doesn't stink like peeling flesh or antiseptic cells or mouldering laundry. Home is safe and welcoming. Home is where loved ones wait. Where the heart is.

Why won't they let him go home?

A clanking well-bottom sound. The cell door carefully hisses open out of its magnalocks. Shinji blinks against the light, waits for shapes to take form and not warp around each other. He sits. Waits. No one comes down the hall, no Misato.

She'd disappeared a little while ago; evaporated through the walls when she was through. Shinji walks to the portal, cranes around for a look. A camera sits in miniature fly-eye clusters, watches on apathetically. For fleeting seconds he can just barely hear an automated voice stating, 'I can't let you do that, Shinji.' He settles down a moment and waits. Nothing. It's when he moves to leave that he notices them: gleaming wet footprints coming from around the far the corner (where the guard station lies) past his door and onward deeper into the prison block. Like someone slipped from the showers and calmly walked on in. Strange smells waltz down the hall from the guard checkpoint. A hum races through his limbs as the air circulation system kicks in. That's when the pungent odor of LCL wafts by. Shiver. He hears the sound of a knell in a private, lucid thought. It promises so many things. Abattoir postcards.

He kneels down, looks at that glistening footprint. Smells the coppery tang of it, tastes the spoiled scent of it with a languid drag of his tongue, presses his cheek against the warmth left behind. Immobilized, Shinji stares down that lonely hall sheened with this watery trail toward, well, he didn't know where. They only ever escort him to this cell, none other. Where did She go? Truth reveals itself in its own time.

-**EXIT**-

The thought makes him smile at the humble beginnings written on the floor here. There'll no longer be hate, no anger, no worries, no peeling skin, no Father, no Misato, no judgment, none of this Atlas act he seemingly provides for NERV. Asuka wants to be the top, wants the fighting, even if she is just a kid, too.

Grub-like he crawls away from the cell, rubbing his face in the drying prints, slowly picks himself up and shambles after Her footsteps into the deep recesses of NERV.

Going home.

* * *

Notifications titter already on their phones. A welcomed respite from the argument that still is brewing up. Angry words from angry women. The intimacies are rapidly falling apart. Always taxing. Neither will broach the subject directly again fearing explosion from the other; neither will motion for overtures of peace or of hope or move to support the other.

Bitterness.

It shatters the very instant the messages are read. Each becomes as wood and is too heavy to move, too shocked. Misato feels weighed down by the words themselves. They aren't a sick joke, and do not with each reading.

"He's gone." A pregnant moment as their eyes meet. The lights dim, turn red as emergency klaxons blare.

"The hangar."

* * *

He stands at a precipice awash in tangible threat. The womb-scent of LCL. The amniotic depths await him. The Entry Plug slides out of Evangelion with a nearly inaudible hiss, then the rhythmic tolling of hydraulic pins locking into place. She knows he's here now. The cockpit opens up, the consoles and seat light up invitingly.

One of the most curious welcome mats he's ever seen.

Inwardly, he praises NERV's severe lack of diligence; it lead him here. They had forgotten to retract the catwalks to the Entry Plug gantry. Shinji desperately wants to leap in, seal the unit and sink far into wine-dark depths, but something... Something weighs his feet to the floor with feelings approaching doubt. Trepidation. An anxious trepidation.

'_Come home, Treasure. Come home.' _As vague as a mirage, watery hands extend from the open doors, beckoning with all the allure of sirens. What promise those sweet hands hold. Distant alarms. He shrugs, takes two tentative steps ever closer to the threshold.

_What would Misato say?_

Disappointment. Always disappointment. Even the lingering joys of his return from inside the Unit a few months back. Where is that joy now? The question of the year. No hope, no hope. Someone shouts his name far below; people swarming the walkways way down there like ants over a carcass. Shinji shies away crossing the threshold with a final step and settles into the pilot-throne.

The door snaps shut with disturbing speed.

The plug pressurizes. LCL already pools around his ankles, stinks of iron filings. Strange gyroscopic sensations move him as the plug screws down into the Evangelion's core unit. His natural equilibrium is off. Balance-he seeks balance. Shinji's head swims, buzzes. He sinks deeper, deeper. Part of him imagines the panic outside: hurried emergency crews scrambling up the lattices and scaffolds, hauling oxygen tanks for the Arcair slice packs. They'd not give a damn about the paintjob.

The LCL charges. His lungs fill as his brain screams again that he's drowning. For delusional seconds, he's five and drowning, every urge in his body, even after so many months, fights and hates the invasion of LCL into his lungs. Coughs.

_Why aren't I swimming to the surface?_

Already the screens pop up, emergency warnings flashing in from the bridge. Eject codes rejected outright. Audio Only links order him out. Even through the distortion, Shinji can make out the nervous tones of Lieutenant Ibuki. Pleads with the boy with his hands on the dead-man's-switch.

A very finely fingered, very feminine hand grasps his chin, soft as currents. He sighs. Ibuki's Audio Only falters, goes silent.

Then, "I-Ikari-kun?" Ibuki says. A deeply febrile tone in her voice.

Distracted by the object of his affections (whatever they may be), Shinji pays her no mind. His lips press against a filmy nothing that tastes of blood. And it tastes good. Deeper, deeper.

He can feel himself shifting in the chair, feel a sudden weight settle in his lap. Her. His clothes suction to his body sticky-wet. Hands glide along curves beaded with impure LCL and deeply beautiful to look at. Her body is transparent as always yet _there. _To touch and taste and crush against. Foamy hands grab his thin wrists and guide his hands to Her chest.

For the second time in his life, Shinji Ikari cups a breast against his hand only this time to savor it. The communications with the outside are cut off by thought. He and She fall deeper inside the Evangelion. Crush depth, point of no return. He's smiling even as he watches himself begin to fade out like a painting splashed with turpentine underneath Her.

'_My baby boy. My Treasure. Home at last.'_

_You love me. Don't you? _He shivers, affixed by that gaze. That gaze which is so full of love and unmistakable dispassion. It's darker now. He can barely see himself. He can't bring himself to name Her. The tip of his tongue, but never farther. Barely see anything but Those Eyes. Something to be shaped.

Those Eyes. And the things she's doing to him now. Oh, the sweet and horrible things she's taking from him. Peeling him like layers of an onion. How long has she known the depths of him? He cannot move, cannot move. Can't look away, can't cry out, even in passion or horror. Any desecration for the unconditional things given. For hours it goes on bleeding into unknown hours and soon epochs he is there. Sitting there holding hands in the train car. Making passionate hurried love there. Scolding him in lives that were never lived. The infinite probabilities and possibilities he could have had. She claims him.

Those Eyes burn away everything he is.

They tell him something, teach him a lesson.

And it is this: It is dark and lonely in the pit of Hell.

* * *

It is God now.

Misato stands there on the walkway. Helpless. All she's ever been in life is helpless. She walks out here time to time, talks to him. It. Her Shinji lies in there somewhere.

She wants a drink and pictures the nice twelve pack waiting at home.

* * *

Two tallboys down and she's not even taken her jacket off. Pen-Pen sits there by his bowl, stares at her impassively.

"Please don't look at me that way. Feed you in a minute, baby."

She will. He chirps when he's fed. It's noise, a good noise to fill the home with. There isn't much left of that. Quiet as a wake nowadays. She and Asuka talk little about it and she vanishes for a day or two at a time. Hiding. Neither of them know what to say.

It's peaceful in a perverse way. She wonders if this is what it's like for any family that's lost a child. That thought lingers with her more and more.

Pops the tab on another tallboy, gets up and walks to the cabinet. Fetches two cans of skipjack and empties them, brine and all, into the penguin's bowl. A happy chirp and bristling of seal-smooth feathers. Tossing the cans and sitting back at the table, she drinks. Drinks until the aches stop and the buzz starts. It takes almost a case for that to happen and when it does, Misato realizes she's well and truly drunk.

_Shithoused. Lookit me now, Shinji. All fucked up. Come through the door and shake your head. _

"Please." she says, staring at the door. She sits there a while and simply listens. The distant peal of thunder. "Just walk through that door..."

Quiet and strangely peaceful, the apartment is a nightmare she cannot wake up from.

* * *

A/N: After taking a considerable break from this piece for personal reasons, I reread it and was not satisfied by it. It felt jumbled, insipid and a rather tired exploitation fic. My usual fare, sure, but I've only corrected a little of it and finished it off as such. I know this one is in a different tense and is far better put together than Enamored. All I can say is well, people grow as writers. I'll get around to revising Enamored someday soon. In fact, I've tentatively started now. I'll post the whole thing sometime soon, just keep an eye out.

Many thanks to Mashadar for help looking over the fic and the patience given. And the lashings.

A shout out to Adam Kadmon for taking a look ages ago to tell me, no, I'm not quite insane yet.

And a question I've received a few times already: was she real? Call it a Shrug of God.

Enjoy it if you can folks. Cheers.


End file.
